Today Of The Dead

Over at Casa Del Malpas we celebrated Día de los Muertos in style last week – I thought I’d post a mix of some of the tracks that accompanied the evening.

My first proper foray into Mexican and Central American music was a pretty mindblowing experience. There’s some wonderful blogs out there covering specifically this, and they’re well worth checkingout.

It has been a while since I’ve encountered a genre of music that is so completely unknown to me. Originating from a traditional courtship dance in Colombia and swiftly spreading across the whole of Central America, Cumbia is some of the most full on party music I’ve ever heard!

“Women playfully wave their long skirts while holding a candle, and men dance behind the women with one hand behind their back and the other hand either holding a hat, putting it on, or taking it off. Male dancers also carried a red handkerchief which they either wrapped around their necks, waved in circles in the air, or held out for the women to hold. Until the mid-20th century, Cumbia was considered to be an inappropriate dance performed primarily by the lower social classes.” more here

The songs in the mix are mainly taken from records put out in Mexico and Colombia during the so-called ‘golden age’ of Cumbia – 1950 to 1975.

To give you a little taste of the evening here’s a photo of a handmade Día de los Muertos skull, one of many made by Faye and Havva :